


in the deadlights

by MathildaHilda



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: Blood and Gore, Canonical Character Death, Child Death, Deadlights (IT), Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Non-Canonical Character Death, Non-Canonical Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-24
Updated: 2019-09-24
Packaged: 2020-10-27 17:28:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20764184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: They’re all dead in the Deadlights.





	in the deadlights

**Author's Note:**

> Read the tags before you read, PLEASE!
> 
> I'm back, sort of! After two weeks internship, a bunch of tests and a goddawful writer's block, I leave you with these absolute mess of a thing

It’s red. The bathroom.

The bathroom is drenched, soaked, drowned, in the sticky redness, and it clings to her hands and her feet and her clothes and her _hair_.

_You look so much like her, Bevvie._ The blood seems to say; spells out into letters on the tiles, the paleness of them shining through like the moon through the trees.

She scrambles away, hits her back against the wall, and wants to bury her face in her hands, but that won’t make anything go away.

The smell, and the blood, is already in her nose, so she holds her hands inches from her face, shielding her eyes enough so that she doesn’t have to see the letters.

(_guess who couldn’t cut it, beverly,)_

There’s the sound of water. Not all of its water.

Stan dies once. Stan dies twice.

The flute bobs in the darkened depths of a bathtub, playing its drowned, solemn melody.

Stan’s smile is all teeth and no lips and no nose and no voice. His hair still curls around his forehead. His eyes still twinkle.

(Stanley dies three times.

Young and Old and Forgotten.)

Balloons break under pressure. It covers this bathroom too, in its dark blood.

It drips, and it drips, and it drips and it drips.

Her own blood spills past her lips.

He holds his arm away from his body in his free hand, asks her to stitch it back on before his mom sees it. The alarm sounds too much like a church bell in the silence Stan left behind. He’s too calm.

The boy talks so much that it’s a wonder he ever knows how to be quiet.

But, he is so despairingly quiet now, pressed against Richie in the murky, green darkness at journey’s end.

His teeth gape through a hole in his cheek. The blood is almost black, almost invisible against the crimson fabric of his shirt.

He’s almost gone.

Something falls. Something breaks. Something dies.

There’s nothing to stitch back together.

It’s a room full of clowns, smiles full of rotten teeth stained with blood and eyes frozen like glass in faces of ivory.

It’s a room with a casket, small and unassuming in a room full of clowns, ravished with hunger for something so very afraid.

The glasses are shattered, splattered with blood. Maggots crawl, werewolves howl, and little boys die.

Little boys die like the puppets left behind by their strings.

Little boys die, when they don’t keep their mouths shut.

The boy in the casket laughs, chokes on the blood that wells past his lips. His eyes are amber, his face is ivory.

The blood clogs her throat. Not a sound escapes.

The eye stares at her from the ground beneath her feet, the poster flaps in the wind where she holds it between her fingers, and her sneakers are soaked through with graywater.

No one’s ever missing in Derry. No one’s ever really dead.

The crows caw their merry song, picks at the face of someone she knows.

The bird with the metal wings, black and silver against the summer sun, shakes itself as if proud, and opens one amber eye.

The picture in the poster winks at her, wiggles its fingers – clad in white silk – far too close to his eyes.

Mike Hanlon’s eyeless everywhere but in reality. The poster is only soaked in the lights.

But, there’s the bang of a bolt gun, and then the bird only smiles.

Georgie’s sick.

Too sick to do anything but play with his turtle; disassemble and assemble it in every which way possible. It always becomes a turtle.

Georgie is sick, and Bill’s bored.

She doesn’t think she begs. She doesn’t think she’s scared.

The police says that the flood could have caught him off guard when he went down to the Barrens.

There’s a scar on his right eyebrow. He stutters. Brown hair, green eyes.

His shoe knocks against hers in a storm drain. There’s laughter in the sewers.

He drowns just out of reach, covered in the dirt he’s already poured out and gotten rid of. The walls collapse, the beams snap. The sound is terrible. There’s dirt in her mouth and under her nails, and splinters in her fingers.

She knows she begs. She knows she’s scared.

She holds his guts in her hands, stares at the slippery mess between her fingers, and throws up the last of the blood.

She’ll die because of all that blood. So will he.

He’s too kind, too gentle; he says it’s okay.

Nothing’s okay.

She wants to scream. She can’t. She wants to.

Her hands are still slippery, and the lights still twinkle, when they wake her up.


End file.
